Minding the Brain: IR as a Science?

Abstract

Invited by the editors to respond to Professor Neumann’s inaugural lecture,¹ in this article I take issue with his core, unquestioned assumption, namely, whether IR should be considered as a science. I use it as a starting point to re-open the question of how the stuff that humans are made of should be studied in IR today. Beyond Neumann’s piece, I critically engage with two emerging trends in the discipline, the so-called new materialisms and the interest in the neurosciences, and articulate my concern that these trends have not addressed the deterministic fallacy that threatens to undermine their relevance for the study of a world made by humans. To the latent anxiety as to whether the discipline has finally achieved recognition of its epistemological status as a science, I respond by recalling that other grand tradition in IR, interpretive methods. The study of meaning from within, without reducing it to countable ‘things’ or to neuronal traces, is, I suggest, better attuned to capturing the contingency, indeterminacy and freedom which constitute key characteristics of the constructed, social world that we study in IR.